The fire season in Riverside County never seems to end. Thankfully, the Riverside County Fire Department (RCOFD) – one of the largest regional fire service organizations in California – is on hand to deal with whatever hot spots flare up. The department, which responded to 106,050 incidents during 2004, is staffed with 746 career and 1,094 volunteer personnel. The service area consists of 16 contracted cities, one community service district, and all of Riverside County’s unincorporated areas. All in all, they cover an area with an assessed real property value of over $77,400,000,000. The RCOFD operates out of fire department headquarters in the City of Perris and 93 fire stations in 17 battalions, providing fire suppression, emergency medical, rescue, and fire prevention services.

The department’s equipment — which has the versatility to respond to both urban and rural emergencies — includes structural engines, rural engines, brush engines, telesquirts, trucks, paramedic units, a hazardous materials unit, incident command units, water tenders, fire crew vehicles, mobile communications centers, breathing support units, lighting units, power supply units, fire dozers, mobile training vans, and mobile emergency feeding units. The RCOFD is the Operational Area Coordinator for the California Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System for all fire service jurisdictions in the County of Riverside. It also has several automatic aid agreements with other city jurisdictions as well as the adjacent National Forests. The Fire Department is a collaborative effort between the County of Riverside and the State of California. The County provides dispatchers while the State is in charge of upper management and firefighting personnel. For more information, visit the Fire website at http://www.rvcfire.org/opencms/index.html.